Our Story
Live Untamed
Wine shaped by the world, made our way.
Our wine is the result of worldly experience and measured science, reinventing traditional style through international inspiration. We traveled across the world working in the wine industry (Austra, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and The United States) picking up ideas and gaining expertise from each place to create a unique tasting experience.
After accumulating a wealth of knowledge, the only thing left to do was share it for the benefit of others. From equal parts enterprise and expertise, we decided to create our own winery – Untamed.
THIS IS UNTAMED TODAY.
The full story of how we got here starts below.
Untamed is a process of becoming; a spirit to set your own path; a liberation bore from the fruits of knowledge.
– Dane & Mckenzie
Every story has a beginning... ours just happens to be all over the map.
There’s a lot between the beginning of this story and the Untamed you know today. A few continents, countless harvests, a garage lab and one very well-timed first date.
Probably best if we tell you ourselves.
Not Exactly the Plan
Wine wasn’t part of the plan.
I grew up in Cape Town, South Africa. My dad was a civil engineer, and the plan was pretty straightforward: study engineering, then eventually join the family business.
So that's what I started doing.
While I was at university, I took a holiday job at a wine estate. I was there for engineering experience, but I found myself paying a lot more attention to the grapes than the project I was supposed to be working on.
That changed things pretty quickly.
I switched into enology, viticulture and pomology and started learning everything I could about wine.
I went to the University of Nevada, Reno and studied Biology and Analytical Chemistry. At the time, I thought I might eventually work in pharmaceuticals.
My research took me into Central and South America studying plant chemistry, and I realized I really liked the combination of science, plants and being out in the field.
Wine ended up being this interesting place where all of those things came together.
It wasn't one big moment where I decided I was going into wine. I just kept getting closer to it.
Chasing Harvest
Ten harvests. Less than five years.
In South Africa, there was this unspoken rule that before you really became a winemaker, you needed about ten harvests behind you.
I understood the idea. I just didn't want it to take ten years.
So I started following harvest from one hemisphere to the other. When South Africa finished, I could head north. When the north finished, I could go south again.
South Africa. Austria. Australia. New Zealand. California. Every cellar did things differently, which was exactly what I wanted.
Instead of one vintage a year, I could sometimes work two. I got my ten harvests in less than five years.
Wine, Science & Each Other
Two very different paths finally crossed.
Dane and I met while we were both working for Constellation Brands. He was a winemaker. I was a chemist.
We had come into the wine industry from completely different directions, but suddenly we were working inside the same one.
And somewhere in there, we started dating.
Our first date was in Napa Valley.
Napa Valley.
Of course.
Then the map got bigger.
We both kept building our careers, and eventually that took us to New Zealand at the same time.
Dane worked at Kim Crawford, and I worked at Selaks.
For me, that experience connected a lot of dots. I understood the chemistry, but now I was seeing what was happening inside the winery every day and how those decisions showed up in the lab.
Another Harvest, Together
Different jobs. Different specialties. Same industry.
The Lab Pros
The Lab Pros started small.
Dane and I started The Lab Pros together in 2017. His background was winemaking. Mine was analytical chemistry. Between the two of us, the idea made sense.
I knew how to do the lab work. I knew the science and I knew there was a need for it.
Running a corporation was a different story.
Suddenly I was learning accounts receivable, organization, clients and all of these other things that had absolutely nothing to do with chemistry.
My dad is an entrepreneur, so I leaned on him a lot in those early years. He became a mentor for the business side of things.
I used to say I knew how to bring in money. I just didn't know how to organize it.
It was definitely scrappy in the beginning. We were doing lab work in the garage and figuring things out as we went.
But it worked.
The Lab Pros became profitable within its first year, and in 2017 we won a $10,000 startup challenge.
An early win for The Lab Pros.
The Lab Pros won a $10,000 startup challenge in its first year, an early milestone for the business Dane and McKenzie were building together.
The science was only part of it. I was young, I was a woman, and I was working with winemakers who had sometimes been doing this for decades.
There was one small winery that would regularly call and question its lab results when my name was on the report.
After it happened enough times, we decided to try something.
We put Dane's name on the report.
I had done the same testing. Nothing about the work had changed.
They didn't call.
That was one of those moments that taught me that knowing the science was only part of running a business. I also had to learn how to work with people, build trust and read the room.
It's different now. There are more women in winemaking, and The Lab Pros has a reputation of its own. I don't have to prove myself in the same way I did in those first years.
Young Alumni of the Year
A year after starting The Lab Pros, McKenzie returned to UNR to be recognized as a 2018 Young Alumni of the Year.
Breaking Free
Eventually, the corporate path stopped fitting.
I'd worked at small wineries and very large ones. I'd learned an enormous amount from both.
But as you move up inside a big company, you can also get farther away from the wine itself.
I wanted to get back to the grapes, the cellar and being able to follow a wine all the way through instead of working on one small piece of a much larger system.
We'd both spent years learning from other people and other wineries. The Lab Pros had also shown us that we could build something ourselves.
Eventually Dane started talking more seriously about wanting to do his own thing.
And I was pretty much the one saying, okay—then let's do it.
Untamed Ground
Texas gave them room to build something different.
We started looking around the country for a place where all of the experience we'd collected could actually be useful.
We wanted to build our own story, not just recreate something we'd already seen somewhere else.
Texas kept pulling us back.
We loved the Hill Country, but more than anything, we loved the people. There was an openness here and an excitement around what Texas wine could become.
So we chose it.
And then there was this.
No winery. No tasting room. No kitchen. No wine club. Just a piece of Texas Hill Country land and a pretty big idea.
What We Built
Opening the doors was only the beginning.
Untamed was another learning curve entirely.
We weren't opening one business. We had the winery, the lab, the tasting room, the kitchen, the restaurant and the wine club. They all had to work together.
In the beginning, Dane and I were doing a lot of the cellar work ourselves while also trying to build everything around it.
Dane had managed people before at larger wineries. I was used to running things myself, so learning to hand things off was probably harder for me.
Honestly, I'm still working on that one.
Finally, we could make wine our way.
Once Untamed was ours, we finally had the freedom to make the wines we wanted to make.
We could work with varieties we believed in, pull from different regions and use techniques we'd picked up over years of harvests around the world.
That approach has gone on to earn Untamed wines Best of Class, Class Champion, Reserve Class Champion, Top of Class, Double Gold and Gold honors in major competitions.
So, who’s making the pizza?
When we opened Untamed in 2021, we knew we wanted great wine and great food. We had an Italian pizza oven, plans for house-made pizzas—and no chef.
So I volunteered.
How hard could it be?
Turns out, pretty hard.
There was a lot of trial and error. I learned the science of mixing, proofing and baking dough, while also learning an oven that had several hot spots and a personality of its own.
And because we'd designed an open kitchen, the entire tasting room had a front-row seat while I figured it out.
For every round, golden pizza that came out of the oven, plenty more came out square and burnt. I got very good at smiling through complete panic.
After a lot of work—and somewhere around 30,000 pizzas—the oven and I finally came to an agreement to tolerate each other.
Three years later, she took one to the finals.
McKenzie entered the competition in Las Vegas with a version of Untamed's South African Summer pizza.
The bananas got some looks.
She made the finals.
It became bigger than the two of them.
We started Untamed because we wanted the freedom to build something our own way.
Somewhere along the way, it stopped being just ours.
It became the people who work beside us, the members who keep coming back, the guests who bring their friends and everyone who has helped make this place what it is.
“Sure, the wine and pizza are great, but it's the people who've truly made this journey worth it.”
And we’re nowhere near done.
There’s still more wine to make, more ideas to chase and plenty left to build. We don’t know exactly what the next chapter looks like yet.
Curated Tastings & Culinary Delights
Tours & Tasting
Enjoy a guided tasting of our current wine collection with one of our knowledgeable wine hosts. Receive curated flight options catered to your taste, or reserve a table to enjoy wine by the glass, by the bottle, and indulge in our Untamed cuisine.